amir ali_evolution of public sphere in india

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Evolution of Public Sphere in India Author(s): Amir Ali Source: Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 36, No. 26 (Jun. 30 - Jul. 6, 2001), pp. 2419-2425Published by: Economic and Political WeeklyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4410806Accessed: 24-04-2015 16:28 UTC

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Special articles

Evolution of Public Sphere in India The particular manner in which the public sphere has evolved in India under colonial

rule and during the national movement and hence the very nature that it has acquired has made it susceptible to the recent advance of Hindutva. It is in the backdrop of the

ambiguities of the national movement, which were partly a result of nationalist responses to colonial rule, that one can understand some of the anomalies in the public sphere as it

currently exists in India. In any consideration of the public sphere its relation to the private sphere cannot be neglected for it is in its relation to the private sphere that the

public is itself defined and given shape. Institutionalising multiculturalism in the public sphere will involve a renegotiation of the relationship between the two spheres. Ways

and means of recreating a public sphere so that it adequately reflects the diversity of the country must be seriously explored.

AMIR ALI

T he inability of the public sphere to reflect a plurality of cultures has resulted in its inaccessibility for

members of minority groups and hence their exclusion from it. As a corollary to this inability to adequately reflect cultural diversity, has been the fact of the public sphere being defined and dominated by majoritarian values and norms, which have been considered to be neutral. This particular tendency has been further accen- tuated and exacerbated by the recent rise in the Indian polity of the phenomenon of Hindutva or Hindu nationalism.This particular phenomenon seeks to firmly entrench and institutionalise the symbols, cultural norms, values and beliefs cherished by it as the only legitimate ones capable of defining the Indian state.

The first section of the article will look at the actual creation of the public sphere under the influence of British colonial rule. For the purposes of understanding the public sphere and its evolution in India, the distinction that Sandria Freitag (1990) makes between the public sphere of western Europe conceptualised by Habermas and what she terms, as the 'public arena' in India will be closely followed. It will be argued that the particular manner in which the public sphere has evolved in India and hence the very nature that it has acquired, has made it susceptible to the recent advance of Hindutva. One of the major goals of Hindu nationalism today is to create a public sphere that is completely defined by the symbols cherished by it. This can be seen in the emphasis that is placed by proponents of Hindutva on symbolic issues like the singing of 'Bande

Mataram' and the 'Saraswati Vandana'. It is on account of this vety reason that it has earlier been argued that the only way to stop the continuous Hindutva advance is by emphasising a multiculturalism that privileges the aspect of making the public sphere more conducive to the expression of minority cultures [see Ali 2000: 1503-1505].

The second section of the article will look at the nature of the public sphere that the national movement helped to configure. Here it will be argued that it was in the ambiguities and anomalies of the national movement, which were partly a result of nationalist responses to colonial rule, that one can understand some of the anomalies in the public sphere as it exists in India at present. In any consideration of the public sphere its relation to the private sphere cannot be neglected for it is in its relation to the private sphere that the public is itself defined and given shape [Habermas 1989: 2]. Therefore, a large part of this article, especially the third section, will refer to the nature of the private sphere and its relation to the public. Further, it will be argued that the very idea of institutionalising multiculturalism in the public sphere will involve a renegotiation of the relationship between the two spheres. The last section of the article is an attempt to look at ways and means to actually recreate the public sphere so that it adequately reflects the diversity of the country.

The idea, to put it briefly, is that colonial rule created a public sphere but left the private sphere free for the native elites. There was thus a very sharp distinction between the two spheres. The public sphere

was thus to be governed by British laws pertaining to areas of life like land relations, criminal law, laws of contract and of evidence. On the other hand, the colonial state was reluctant to encroach upon the private spheres of the two major religious communities. This reluctance can be seen in its policy of allowing this sphere to be governed by Hindu and Muslim laws which were defined as personal law and which dealt with areas of life that were more intimate like family relationships, family property and religious life [Sarkar 1993: 1871]. It is in this dichotomy between the public and private spheres and the political jockeying that took place among native elites for control and domination over the private sphere that one can understand the particular institutionalisation of the two spheres in the Indian polity. The fact that the nationalist movement was to formulate a response to colonial rule that was very closely tied with the private sphere has further influenced the shape that the public and private spheres have taken.

Influence of Colonial Policies The present configuration of the public

sphere as it is to be found in India has been decisively shaped by the experience of British colonialism and the national movement that arose in response to it. These two influences have continued to exert a strong influence in the postcolonial era. In fact, it is only by analysing the actual manner of the evolution of the public sphere in India that an understanding can be reached regarding its specific characteristics.

Economic and Political Weekly June 30, 2001 2419



It would perhaps be useful to begin with the influence of British colonial policies first. One of the more significant of these is the precise manner in which the British imperial state in India chose to interact with the population at large. Sandria Freitag has noted that the very nature of the imperial 'intruding state' ruled out the possibility of a direct relationship between the individual and the state.The British state chose instead to rely on a 'representational mode of governance' that was based sociologi- cally on discrete communities, with particular individuals representing those interests [see Freitag 1990: 191-92].Thus, certain individuals would invariably be chosen as the representatives of the discrete communities identified by the colonial state and they would then represent the interests of the community, which acted as their political constituency. It was in this manner that the 'representational mode of governance' mentioned above was to evolve. More importantly, this representational mode of governance ensured that the native elites, the ones privileged by the British state as the legitimate representatives of their particular communities, had an important stake in this form of governance. Freitag observes that this pattern of state intrusions differed dramatically from the pattern of state intrusions in England and France in the 19th century. This particular manner of the interaction between the imperial state and individuals, with communities mediating the relationship has had important consequences, especially the manner in which the public sphere is related to the private sphere.

The differences in the nature of the public sphere as it is to be found in India and the public sphere in England and France have been traced by Freitag to the different ways in which the community was linked to the individual and the state. In the case of India it has already been noted that the very nature of the imperial state ruled out the possibility of a direct relationship between the individual and the state. National rituals in Europe emphasised common values and 'traditions'. They stressed a history that defined participants as alike in their relationship to the state. On the contrary, imperial rituals in British India stressed the 'diversity' of British imperial rule. Freitag points out that recent European social history has among one of its central aspects of the illumination of the process by which popular identification with local community became transmuted into identification with a larger entity. Public participation in collective activities like ceremonies and public protests created an important corollary to the nation state - the 'public sphere' in which individuals participated in the shaping of their states through the exercise

of public opinion. These ceremonies and protests provided the widening ideological framework that informed the connection between nation state and the individual [Freitag 1990: 177]. Thus, two elements were to prove important in the European shift of popular identification from local community to that of the nation state in England and France, according to Freitag. The first was participation in collective rituals informed by an ideological framework that came to equate'community' and 'nation'. Secondly, the creation of a public sphere in which citizens of the nation helped to shape it through the exercise of public opinion. This shift in the organisation of community around the local community to one in which individuals identified with the nation was accompanied by the creation of. a public sphere, which was fully elaborated and institutionalised in the 19th century.

Freitag observes that while the various characteristics of the nation statecited above were indeed to serve as an important model for third world nationalism,these processes were not wholly replicated in the colonial part of the world with the inevitable local influences creeping in. Thus while there were'superficial similarities' which made it seem that the European model of the nation and its public sphere could be borrowed directly, substantive differences prevented an easy translation to British India [Freitag 1990:192]. As result of these substantive differences anti-imperial agi- tators in north India drew not from the European model of state-individual relationships but from definitions of community established in north India in the late 19th century. Freitag observes that most of these north Indian definitions revolved around religious identity. As a consequence politicised religious identity or communalism emerged as an equivalent and viable alternative to nationalism [Freitag 1990: 196]. As a result of the cultural particularities prevalent in India there emerged what Freitag terms as public arenas as opposed to the public sphere in western Europe. Public arenas facilitated popular participation in ritual enactment of the polity. They provided an important impe- tus to integration in 19th century India. By serving as a conduit for the expression of symbolic statements of collective values, they performed a role very similar to that of public opinion in Europe expressed through the public sphere [Freitag 1990: 192]. The problem of reshaping the public arena to function as the equivalent of the western public sphere revolved around issues of authority and legitimacy, which also lay at the heart of collective ritual as it came to be shaped in the modern nation state of the west [Freitag 1990: 284].

It is important at this stage to search for

the explanation of the present configuration of the Indian public sphere in the nature acquired by the national movement in response to colonial rule.The reason for this is that the right to national self determination can be considered as the right to ones own public sphere, in which the latter is defined by certain desirable cultural norms, values, beliefs and practices [Tamir 1993: 70]. However, the right to national self-determination and its concomitant public sphere are invariably weighted against the minorities. The resultant public sphere is therefore largely defined by the cultural values and symbols of the majority.Further, for Tamir minority disadvantage arises when members of minority communities are prevented from carr- ying their cultural particularity into the public sphere [Tamir 1993: 53]. It is for this very reason that Tamir argues for a 'liberal nationalism' that combines the legitimate need for recognition by a people with their right to democratic participation and political representation. This liberal nationalism further seeks to provide safeguards to the minorities and thereby prevents the construction of a public sphere that is culturally inaccessible to its members.

It was the coexistence of diverse tendencies in the Indian national movement and the frequent suppression of the more liberal ones that was to result in the shaping of the public sphere in its present form. Thus it was the more illiberal and retrogressive tendencies within the national movement that gave rise to those aspects of the public sphere that make it less democratic and prevent its being accessible to large sections of the population. Freitag, noting the differences that arose in the public sphere in western Europe and in India, argues that in creating a south Asian equivalent of the nation state's public sphere, anti-imperialism could not provide the same base as nationalism would have, and that community was later sought as the base instead [Freitag 1990: 230].

The more important and subtle point to note is that the present distortions that are to be found in the public sphere are, in fact, a telling commentary on the exact nature of the national movement.They provide an insight on those less desirable aspects of it that often compromised with or colluded with the colonial authorities [see Sarkar 1993]. The compromises and collusion took place at the level of the native elites who were eager for the guarantee of their own separate sphere of influence. This sphere of influence, it is important to add, lay in the private sphere of the communities that they represented. This particular aspect of the public and private spheres and their relations to the anomalies of the national movement will be more fully taken

2420 Economic and Political Weekly June 30, 2001



up in a subsequent section. For the present it is enough to emphasise that such anomalies occurred due firstly to the nature of the relationship between the public and private domains, as the two domains had evolved under the influence of British colonial rule; and secondly the political bargaining that took place between colonial elites on the one hand and native elites on the other for political influence over the two spheres [see Sinha 1995].

II Influence of

National Movement Freitag, extending her analysis, seeks to

bring out the links that exist between public arena activities and the national movement. Freitag uses the example of the Cow Protection Movements of the late 19th century as a public arena activity to argue that while it was 'clearly not nationalism' yet the point is that "it operated in the very same public spaces, utilising the same forms of publicity andvenues of communication, and made very similar kinds of demands for protection of shared values and modes of behaviour as did the nationalist movement" [Freitag 1996: 219-20]. Freitag as- serts that it is important to emphasise these points because, for her, the example rein- forces Partha Chatterjee's point of Indian nationalism being a derivative discourse. Thus, movements like the one for Cow Protection "had at least as influential an impact on the development of Indian nationalism as did the western model from which its vocabulary was often drawn". In this way, the national movement has 'helped to shape a very differently config- ured civil society' [Freitag 1996: 220].

Neera Chandhoke (1998) has also pointed out the difference in contexts that exist between assertions of civil society in the west and those in post-colonial soci- eties like India. She notes that the assertion of civil society in the west is based upon a shared collective memory of the manner in which limits and restraints were placed upon absolutist states b' the activities of self-conscious rights bearing individuals in association with others. The west thus has a history of the assertion of civil society against the state and it is precisely this shared history that is sought to be recap- tured and recreated when the slogan of civil society is invoked against the state. However, in the case of the post-colonial world it is not a question of the 'remem- brance' of, but the 'creation' of civil society as the sphere where democratic politics can be constructed. Civil society has thus become the 'leitmotif of movements strug- gling to free themselves from the clutches of irresponsible and often tyrannical post-

colonial elites. Thus for Chandhoke while the first wave of liberation took place along with decolonisation, the second wave comes up against those very elites who had taken over power with decolonisation. In many cases, Chandhoke feels that this reassertion amounts to a re-examination of the political discourse that informed under-

.standings of the decolonised world. Chandhoke's analysis of the ills of Indian civil society, in a manner similar to the way in which the present distortions in the Indian public sphere have been traced to the anomalies of the national movement above, also lead her to go back to the moment of independence to 'see what went wrong' [Chandhoke 1998: 30].

Ill Relationship between Public

and Private Spheres The particular relationship that the public

sphere bears with the private sphere is itself an outcome of colonial practices. More specifically, it was an outcome of the manner in which the colonial elite, in accordance with its 'representational mode of governance', chose to interact with native elites, the representatives of various communities.What is distinctive about the private sphere is that the imperial state would almost invariably leave the private sphere alone and would be reluctant to encroach upon this sphere. This is not to say that the imperial state had no influence whatsoever on the private sphere. It cer- tainly did intervene in the private sphere, for example to codify the personal laws of communities [see Freitag 1996: 212]; however, the point here is that even this limited intervention was meant to uphold or ended up actually reinforcing and strengthening the boundaries defining the private sphere.

In fact, the sharp division between the two spheres was a reflection of the basic division in the legal domain postulated by English legislators andjudges. Thus, British and Anglo-Indian law had a 'territorial' scope and ruled over the 'public' world of land relations, criminal law, laws of contract and of evidence. In sharp contra- distinction to this were Hindu and Muslim laws which were defined as 'personal', covering persons rather than areas, and dealing with more intimate areas of human existence - family relationships, family property, and religious life. This sharp distinction was further bolstered by the Queen's Proclamation of 1859, which promised absolute non-interference in religious matters. There was thus a certain wariness on the part of the colonial state towards encroaching on the private sphere especially in the post 1857 decades [Sarkar

1993: 1871 ]. The conscious policy of leav- ing an inviolable private sphere for the native elites was in keeping with the shift in British policies in the immediate aftermath of the Mutiny of 1857. This shift was from an Anglicist aim of creating a class of westernised Indians as conceived in Macaulay's famous minute on education in 1835 to the conscious courting and encouragement of the more orthodox or traditional Indian groups [Sinhl 1995: 4].

The reluctance of the British to intrude into the private spheres of the two major religious communities, the Hindusand the Muslims,was to result in two similar responses from the elites of both communities.What was common to these responses was that both were decidedly revivalist in content and both of them supported and strengthened the national movement. In the case of Hindu revivalist nationalism, resistance was to be mani- fested in the hostility to the Age of Consent Bill of 1891. In the case of Muslim revivalism in the form of the Deoband School, it was to be seen in the creation of an autonomous community with its own private sphere.The boundaries of this sphere were sharply defined and the activities of this sphere were not to be interfered with by either the colonial authorities or a later post-colonial Indian state.

While looking at two decidedly revivalist responses that formed an important part of the nationalist movement, it is important to differentiate between the various streams of the nationalist movement itself.There were thus elements rang- ing from liberals to revivalists to commu- nists and socialists in the national movement. For the present, we need to focus on the revivalistelements of the movement to gain an understanding of the distortions that are to be found in the public sphere. What is thus being argued here is that the present configuration of the public sphere and its anomalies that have been mentioned earlier have been conditioned by the more revivalist tendencies within the nationalist movement. Both of these revivalist tendencies will be considered in turn. Firstly the responses of the Deoband School will be taken into account and secondly the responses of revivalist Hindu nationalism will be considered. It will further be argued that two contemporary problems that have been witnessed recently in the Indian polity, namely the Shah Bano controversy and the rise of Hindutva, both involving controversies over private and public domains, are inextricably linked to these responses mentioned above. Thus, the furore that erupted over the Shah Bano ruling by the Supreme Court was a direct outcome of the Deoband School's creation of an autonomous private sphere in the




latter half of the 19th century. Peter Hardy (1972) has described this system as a form of 'judicial apartheid'. Its implications were obvious in the perceived violation of the Muslim private sphere after the Supreme Court's ruling on the Shah Banocase in 1985 and the subsequent calls to protect Muslim Personal Law. All these developments were to lead to the passage of the Muslim Women's Proteckion of Rights on Divorce Bill in May 1986 by the Rajiv Gandhi led Congress government on the ostensible- grounds of protecting minority rights.

In similar ways, the contemporary reassertion of Hindutva is a result of the kind of revivalist nationalism that was initially formulated by Bankim Chandra Chat- topadhyay in his writings in the latter half of the 19th century. The two controversies are further linked in the sense that both arose around the same time, that is in the mid-1980s. In fact the Shah Bano controversy was to actually impart an unparalleled momentum to the emerging politics of Hindutva as the former was effectively used by the latter to reinforce the idea that the Indian state was appeasing Muslims.

The difference between the two however lay in the fact that while the Muslim response to the Shah Bano judgment was meant to protect the Muslim private sphere from a perceived encroachment by the Supreme Court; the Hindutva movement was out to stamp the Indian public sphere with the symbols, cultural values and norms of Hindu nationalism.This attempt to re- define the public sphere is significant as the politics of Hindu nationalism was taken out of the private sphere of the Hindu family and Hindu conjugality where it had existed in the latter part of the 19th century [Sarkar 1993]. This shift is indeed significant and represents the dissatisfaction of the votaries of Hindutva with the way in which the public sphere of the Indian state had been defined in the post-independence period. It is obvious that the more liberal streams of the nationalist movement had considerable influence in the shaping of the post-colonial public sphere in India and it is particularly such liberal sentiments that Hindutva has chosen to de- nounce. This can be seen in its various challenges to ideas that had till recently been accepted as an integral part of Indian public life, for example the manner in which Nehruvian secularism has been successfully portrayed as being alien to the particularities of the country.

The revivalism of the Deoband School will be considered a response of the 'religious elite' of the Muslims in India to the changed circumstances that it was con- fronted with in the immediate aftermath- of the Mutiny of 1857. The particular predicament that the religious elite faced was

that the events of 1857 represented notjust the loss of political power from Muslim hands to British hand, which in itself was a momentous loss. More importantly, it brought into focus the problem of living in a predominantly non-Muslim society as a numerical minority without the benefits of political power [Kepel 1997]. This particular predicament which had never before been experienced in any part of the Islamic world was resolved by arriving at what Barbara Daly Metcalf (1982) terms a 'modus vivendi'. This involved the acceptanceof the legitimacy of British rule in return for the guarantee or assurance of a private sphere in which the religious and cultural observances of the Muslims as enshrined in the sharia could be faithfully carried out. This of course would be done without interruption from the British state or the fear of being swamped by the larger non-Muslim society. The important point to note is that the political trajectory taken by the religious elite at no point of time took it anywhere near the idea of creating a separate Islamic state of Pakistan. It was merely content with the continued maintenance of its private sphere and it is for this reason that it sided with the Congress-led national movement, a political position that it was to articulate forcefully and clearly with the creation in 1919 of the Jamiat- al-ulama-e-Hind.

Mrinalini Sinha (1995) in her book Colonial Masculinity has studied in detail two differently positioned elites, one among the colonisers and the other among the colonised. From the 'perspective of the uneven and contradictory intersection of various axes of powers', 'the dynamics between colonialism and nationalism', on the one hand and between 'colonial India and metropolitan British society' on the other,Sinha' s book seeks to reconceptualise some of the major colonial controversies of the late 19th century in India. The book looks at four specific controversies: the 'white mutiny against the Ilbert Bill in 1883, the official government response to the Native Volunteer Movement in 1885, the recommendations of the Public Service Commission of 1886, and the Indian opposition to the age of Consent Bill in 1891 [Sinha 1995:1].

It is especially the last of these controversies mentioned above that is important for our purpose of analysing the manner in which a distinctive private sphere was created as the result of a compromise between the colonial elite on the one hand and the native elite on the other. What is remarkable about the passage of the Age of Consent Bill is that its limited nature itself was a compromise with indigenous upper caste patriarchal norms and practices [Sinha 1995:138]. Interestingly

enough the defence of an unreformed indigenous patriarchy served as the me- dium for revitalising nationalist politics in late 19th century India. Tanika Sarkar (1993) sees this as the result of the gradual disillusionment of Indian nationalists with the 'public sphere' as an arena for the test of manhood. The result of this disillusionment was a withdrawal of emphasis from the public to the private domain with Hindu conjugality and domestic social arrange- ments becoming an intensely politicised arena in colonial and national conflicts [Sinha 1995: 139; Sarkar 1993: 1870-71]. This withdrawal was accompanied by the fact that the colonial authorities had conceded the indigenous domestic realm as an autonomous site for native masculinity [Sinha 1995: 140]:

Rather than seeing the Age of Consent Bill controversy as being a simple rejuve- nation of nationalist politics in India, Sinha finds the agitation against the bill more 'ambiguous'. She sees the controversy as aligning with rather than challenging colonial politics.The politics of 'colonial masculinity', as Sinha refers to it, ensured that the opposition to the bill wasinter- preted as being nationalist and yet this supposed opposition actually brought it into closer harmony with colonial politics. There thus existed a certain complicity between colonial politics and nationalist politics. This was effected by an agree- ment to leave the domestic realm of all customary practices designated as 'private' as the arena of Indian autonomy. This colonial policy of non-interference thereby committed itself to the nurturing of orthodox indigenous practices similar to the manner in which the Deoband School's demand for a private sphere was conceded. It was in fact in line with the shift, after the Mutiny of 1857, in favour of the conscious courting and encouragement of the more orthodox tendencies and social groups.

The fact that the Age of Consent Bill controversy resulted in the empowering of the revivalist-nationalist opponents of the bill at the expense of the reformist-nationalist supporters of the bill [Sinha 1995: 152] underlines the anomalies of the national movement that have been mentioned above. Tanika Sarkar has also pointed out in this connection that the historian cannot afford to look at the colonial past as an unproblematic retrospect where all power was on one side and all protest on the other. Instead, a 'multifac- eted nationalism' (and not simply its liberal variant) has to be taken into account, which involved aspects of complicity with power and domination even when they critiqued western knowledge and chal- lenged colonial power [Sarkar 1993:1870].




To conclude then, the alternative private sphere regulated by Muslim and Hindu laws was juxtaposed with the public sphere of criminal codes, land relations, laws of contract,etc, that were regulated by British and colonial law [Sinha 1995: 141]. Further, the fact that the national movement found support from revivalist quarters has conditioned the very formation of the public sphere in the post-independence period. There are also striking similarities between the two revivalist responses being discussed. Both responses took advantage of the shift in British colonial policy im- mediately after the mutiny, a shift that preferred to leave traditional native practices alone, thereby resulting in the encouragement of native orthodoxy. This was achieved through the guarantee of an inviolable private sphere. The parallels between the two extend much further when one considers the fact that both revivalist tendencies contributed immense support to the national movement. Thus, Deoband was to extend unstinted support to the Congress led national movement and Hindu revivalist nationalism was to articulate a nationalism that was situated firmly within the Hindu private sphere.2 It is only after such a consideration that we can look at ways of correcting the anomalies of the public sphere as it is to be found in India.

IV Private and Public Spheres in Post-Independence India Freitag has noted that the British state

proceeded to create and design institutions of governance that were premised on the sharp distinction between the private and the public spheres. She notes that within this dichotomy the state identified itself as the protector and protagonist for 'general' or public interests after which it relegated 'private'or 'particular' interests to the numerous communities constituting the realm.One of the difficulties of this division was that it assumed all 'political' issues could be accommodated within the state's institutions. Issues related to religion, kinship, and other forms of community identity were considered 'apolitical' and thus not requiring the attention of the state and its institutions. However, this did not rule out the state's intervening in the private sphere, the most prominent instance of which was its codifying personal laws for Hindus and Muslims [see Freitag 1996: 212].

This sharp distinction was to be later reflected in the manner in which the pro- visionsof minority empowerment were later incorporated into the Indian constitution. Gurpreet Mahajan has noted that the Indian Constitution devised a 'two-fold'

policy. On the one hand it tried to ensure that no community is excluded or system- atically disadvantaged in the public arena, on the other it provided autonomy to each community to follow its own way of life in the private sphere [Mahajan 1998: 4].

Gurpreet Mahajan has argued that provisions for minority empowerment have had perverse effects in this country because of the fact that religious and cultural communities have escaped the effects of democratisation and the breaking of hier- archies. The private sphere has thus been made inaccessible to the reach of legislation especially legislation that seeks to reform it. This attitude has often been defended in the name of the inviolability of the private sphere. However, a closer examination of this contention reveals that inviolability, while itself being a valid premise for the private sphere cannot be used to justify the complete resistance to reformist legislation. This resistance shown

-by defenders of the private sphere has often bordered on outright hostility.

The resultant lack of democratisation, alongwith the fact that Indian society has not experienced the gradual effects of secularisation, thereby resulting in the continued powerful appeal of religion, have combined to ensure that the effects of provisions for minority empowerment have had a number of perverse effects. They have led to the actual reinforcement of the more conservative social tendencies within communities, the bolstering of the position of religious leaders and the ruling out of the possibility df revising the cultural practices of communities [Mahajan 1998: 7]. This stands out in sharp contrast to the west where provisions for minority empowerment wereadvanced after the suc- cess of the democratic project when the internal structures of religious and cultural communities had been significantly demo- cratised. Further, such provisions were ad- vanced after religion had ceased to be such an important force in people's lives.

Earlier a distinction was made between the political demands that were put forward by the 'religious elite' of the revivalist Deoband School and the political demands of the modernist 'political elite' of Aligarh (see endnote 1). What will be argued here is that the later institutionalisation of the private/public distinction in the Indian constitution referred to above and the different provisions for minority empowerment pertaining to these two spheres can be explained in terms of the distinct nature of the political demands made by the religious and political elites of the Mus- lims. The purpose of differentiating between the religious and political elite is to show that the demands that were put forward by the religiouselite were of a

qualitatively distinct nature from those of the political elite. While the religious elite was content with the creation and continued maintenance of a private sphere in which Muslim religious observances and practices could be carried out; the political elite demanded that Muslims be given adequate representation in the institutions of the public sphere like representation in the legislatures and reservation of government jobs. The demands of the religious elite were to directly influence the first part of the Indian Constitution's 'two-fold' policy, i e, the provisions pertaining to the conceding of autonomy to each religious community to carry out its distinct religious and cultural practices in its own private sphere.The demands put forward by the political elite, concerned with se- curing representation for Muslims in the public domain, very indirectly influenced the second part of the constitution because such political provisions, while they were definitely debated and even passed by the constituent assembly, were subsequently dropped [see Ansari 1999].

The reason why the demands articulated by the religious elite were the ones that were finally incorporated into the Indian Constitution is due to the religious elite siding with the Congress led national movement and continuously opposing the demands for a separate state of Pakistan. The demands of the political elite for provisions for representation were obviously deemed unacceptable' by the Congress. Freitag (1990) has noted that while Mus- lims were successful in creating a community ideology for public arenas, by the early 1930s they had no alternative to offer to a state structure that embodied Hindu populist ideology.Hindu populism felt that community interests could be protected by the imposition of an independent Indian state informed byHindu majoritarian values. Muslim interests however could not be protected by either the British Raj or by a majority dominated independent state. Freitag concludes that the result of such a large contingent of the body-politic not having access to influence on the state through public opinion expressed in public arenas, precluded the development of a public sphere like that represented by the western European model [Freitag 1990: 244].3

V Reinventing Public Sphere

The manner in which the Indian public sphere has evolved under the influence of colonial practices and the national movement has been noted. Further the nature of the public sphere in post-independence India and the effects of two momentous




and interlinked developments in the Indian polity in the mid-1980s, namely, the Shah Bano controversy and the rise of the Hindutva movement, have also been considered. Freitag feels that it is in the very nature and functioning of civil society, or the operation of the public sphere that one can find the content of the contestations that have continued to plague the Indian polity over the past few years [Freitag 1996: 21 1].Therefore, it is in the realm of the public sphere and the civil society that occupies this realm that we must search for a solution.This means looking for ways in which multiculturalism can be institutionalised in the public sphere. This indeed, is not going to be an easy task, considering the fact that the BJP-led NDA government is firmly in the saddle of governance. The process of making the public sphere more conducive to the expression of minority cultures needs to be undertaken through two separate efforts that are almost simultaneous and parallel. The first is by'occu- pying the public sphere and preventing its further appropriation by the forces of Hindutva and the second is by renegoti- ating the relationship between the public and private spheres.

First a look at the public sphere. At the highest and most symbolic level this would involve spreading the realisation that the various symbols of the Indian state have a distinct majoritarian tinge to them and hence the difficulty that large sections of the Indian population face in identifying with them. This would mean a total and outright rejection of the symbolic appeals made by the Sangh parivar through calls for singing the 'Bande Mataram' and the 'Saraswati Vandana'.

Given the fact that in present-day Indian political life the Sangh has appropriated for itself the complete monopoly over sentiments like patriotism and nationalism, there will inevitably be accusations that proponents of an Indian multiculturalism are anti-national because they uphold a concept that is alien. Such accusations have to be countered by demonstrating that Hindu nationalism while not only being just one form of nationalism, among many others, is in fact the most retrogressive. This can be done by bringing back from the margins the other forms of nationalism that the Hindutva discourse has been successful in marginalising, and thereby creating adiscursive field fora numberof con- tending nationalisms. It is important to point out that the national movement was not one monolithic block but consisted of a number of different streams of nationalism like Nehruvian nationalism, Gandhian nationalism, Ambedkarite nationalism and Left nationalism, to name but a few of them.

While initiating a debate on multi-

culturalism in this country it must further be kept in mind that apart from the concept being vilified as being an alien construct unsuited to the cultural ethos of India, by the Sangh parivar, there is also the possibility of its being distorted and appropriated by it. This has happened in the case of secularism, which has been portrayed as being false (pseudo-secularism), after which an 'indigenous', homegrown variety of secularism has been offered. It must be made clearat the very outset of the debate on multiculturalism that the concept is meant to counter the anti-democratic impulses of the Hindutva movement and thereby save the Indian public sphere and civil society from being subverted by these forces.

Further, what has to be taken note of is the fact that important public institutions that form a part of civil society are being increasingly taken over by these forces. One has to mention only the important ones with the educational and research institutions being the most prominent - the Indian Council for Historical Research (ICHR), the Indian Council for Social Sciences Research (ICSSR), the Univer- sity Grants Commission (UGC), the Na- tional Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) and the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) being the latest to be added to the list.

After having considered the public sphere, it needs to be added that there is a simultaneous need to initiate a parallel effort to reform the private sphere. The underlying principle that needs to guide the efforts to reformulate the two spheres is increased democratisation and one cannot conceive of a democratic public sphere coexisting with an oppressive and undemocratic private sphere. The consequences of an undemocratic and oppressive private sphere, where structures of patriarchy remain intact .are obvious in the manner in which minority rights pertaining to the private sphere of community and religious practices have had perverse effects [Mahajan 1998]. In this direction, there is a need to initiate reform in the personal laws of various communities. The demand for a uniform civil code is not the exclusive preserve of the Hindu Right and this particular demand has also been raised by other democratic and progressive sections. Therefore.there is a need to ensure that if a debate on a uniform civil code is conducted at this stage, it is done so without the unwanted interference of the Hindu Right. Further, this debate is conducted keeping in mind those who persist in their demands for a separate personal law, especially aspects of such demands that are justified [Bhargava 1999]. Such a debate will ensure that the acceptable limits of cultural diversity can be negotiated and

that further 'aspects of the liberal ethic can be incorporated' into existing community practices so that community rights do not clash with principles of gender equality [Mahajan 1998:7]. This will further ensure that at least the problem areas are sorted out rather than being exacerbated as usually happens when such a demand is raised from Hindutva quarters. 313

Notes 1 The response of the religious elite of Deoband

has to be seen in sharp distinction to that of the political elite centred in the Mohammedan Anglo Oriental College, which later became the Aligarh Muslim University. While the religious elite was preoccupied with the creation and maintenance of a private sphere, the objectives of the political elite were representation for the Muslims in the central and provincial legislatures and reservation of seats for the Muslims in the bureaucracy, objectives that definitely lay in the public domain.What is interesting to note is that the religious elite at no point of time conceived the idea of a separate Islamic state of Pakistan. On the other hand the political trajectory taken by the political elite of Aligarh was to lead it towards aln increasing separatism that resulted ultimately in the creation of Pakistan. This distinction that has been made between the religious and political elites each being represented by Deoband and Aligarh respectively has been borrowed from Ira M Lapidus (1987). Thus Lapidus has identified two different responses to European colonialism - the first coming from the political elites and the newly formed intelligentsia who had received western education and upon whom the achievements of the west had left a deep and lasting impression. They favoured a modified interpretation of Islam to suit the changing nature of the times. The second response came from the tribal leaders and the merchant and commercial farming strata led by the ulema and the Sufis who argued for a reorganisation of Muslim communities and the reform of individual behaviour in line with fundamental religious principles. What is particularly striking about the Indian situation is that it was the modern, secular and westernised leadership provided by the political elite that was to become the main proponent of a separate state of Pakistan. On the other hand the orthodox religious leadership provided by the ulema was to consistently oppose the creation of such a state on religious grounds, reaffirm its con- fidence in composite nationalism and remain within the fold of the Congress led national movement. Lapidus has located the cause for this development in the peculiarities of the Indian situation with its attendant pluralism.This pluralism was to bring forth a multi-sided response to colonial rule and lead to a power struggle within the Muslim community amongst the several Islamic modernist, secularist, nationalist, socialist and Muslim traditional and reforming elites [Lapidus 1987: 97, 101].

To gain a further understanding of the differences that separated the religious elite of Deoband and the political elite of Aligarh it is perhaps useful to take note of the marked class differences between the supporters of the two. Deoband drew upon Muslims who were predominantly urban and ashraf and belonged mainly to the lower middle classes and were petit-bourgeois. Hardy has described them as being 'poor ratherthan rich', 'respectable rather than ruffianly','school educated rather than




university or college educated', and 'traditionally rather than modern educated'. They were drawn from professions like printers, lithographers, booksellers, skilled crafstmen and petty zamindars. They were literate in the vernacular and able and willing to read the large output of Muslim devotional literature that was published every year [Hardy 1972:169j. Aligarh on the other hand found its support bases in the more privileged upper classes and upper middle classes. Its most influential supporters were the large zamindars of the powerful landed aristocracy of the Western United Provinces and the English educated upper middle class Muslims who held important positions in the government. The religious and political concerns of the two were completely different. For Deoband it was maintaining the purity of the sharia and for Aligarh it was preserving the position of pre-eminence that the Urdu speaking elite of the United Provinces had hitherto enjoyed. It was probably the realisation among the Deobandis that a future Pakistan would be led by westernised secular Muslims devoid of respect for the sharia which led them to cast their lot with a Hindu dominated India [Faruqi 1963].

2 On the nationalist movement and its carving out a unique space for itself in the spiritual domain where it declared its sovereignty from colonial domination see Chatterjee (1993). Chatterjee while discussing the uniqueness of Indian nationalism seeks to recapture a domain for it in which it can be independently imagined without nationalism necessarily being 'modular' in character. Chatterjee states that the distinction between the material and 'spiritual domains does not coincide with the public/private distinction (ibid: 10). However, the point is that the spiritual domain lay definitely inside the private sphere of Hindu family life and conjugality especially as it was formulated in the latter half of the 19th century. The problem with Chaterjee's formulation is that while he may have succeeded in capturing for a third world nationalism like India's its own right to imagine its form of national community against Anderson's 'modular' nationalisms that had to be handed down to the third world, he fails to evaluate the nature of the nationalism that was actually formulated. Thus, Chatterjee finds the phase in which 'there was a strong resistance to allowing the colonial state to intervene in matters affecting 'national culture' as the period of nationalism. It is in this spiritual domain that according to Chatterjee 'nationalism launches its mostpowerful, creative and historically significant project' [Chatterjee 1993: 6]. On Bankim Chandra's influence on Indian nationalism [Chatterjee 1985: chapter 3].

3 Iqbal Ansari (1999) has gone into the history of the debates in the constituent assembly to show the manner in which various provisions for minority rights were continuously 'denuded' and 'watered down'. He concludes that the commitment of the framers of the Indian Constitution to such rights were merely 'skin deep'. Ansari begins with the Lahore Resolution of the Congress of 1929 which assured the Muslims and the Sikhs that no solution to the communal question would be acceptable to the Congress that did not fully convince the parties concerned [Ansari 1999: 1131. He then goes on to the Congress's Karachi resolution of March 1931 and continues his narrative till 1949, the year the Constitution was passed, to show the manner in which the whole issue of minority rights in the Indian Constitution was derailed at the instance of Sardar Patel. The 1931 resolution dealt with Fundamental Rights and Duties of citizens, which provided for the right to equality and non-discrimination and sought to guarantee the protection of the culture,

language and the script of the minorities. It requiredthestate to observe neutrality with regard to all religions [Ansari 1998: 114]. In addition, Ansari also takes note of'the Round table Conference that took place in the same year as the Congress passed the Karachi resolution. The Round Table Conference is important in a consideration of minority demands as the Congress accepted the various provisions relating to them like non-interference with personal laws, in addition to which there were guarantees of provisions in the fundamental rights to protect such personal laws, the protection of language, culture, script, religion, etc.

The crucial period in the debate on minority rights was between August 1947 and May 1949. Ansari argues that the Advisory Com- mittee of the Constituent Assembly on Fundamental Rights, headed by Sardar Patel, accepted most of the recommendations of the sub-committee on minorities(chaired by a Christian member, H C Mookherjee, who is described by Ansari-as being 'pliant' and hence susceptible to be swayed by Patel) and adopted its Report on Minority Rights on August 8, 1947. He adds that the entire scheme of political and economic safeguards provided for in the report was in accordance with the Congress's policy on minorities, as it had evolved since the late 1920s.The constituent assembly adopted on August 27 and 28, 1947 the entire report of the Advisory Committee providing for reservation of seats for minorities based on their population under joint electorates in the central and provincial legislatures. Then in February 1948, the recommendations of the Advisory Committee were written into the Draft Constitution in Part XIV under the title 'Special Rights Relating to Minorities'. Ansari feels that things seemed to be on course until April 1949. It was in his letter of the May 11,1949 that Sardar Patel reopened the issue of minority rights in the Constitution, an issue that had almost been sealed. In the reconsideration of the issue of minority rights that was effected by Patel, it was the provisions relating to the political and economic rights of minorities that was to become the victim, while the other set of rights relating to religious, educational and cultural rights was allowed to be included.

Ansari opines that the dilution of minority rights was done on the initiative of Sardar Patel based on his appealing to the sentiments of pure nationalism. In this view, the rights that were being guaranteed to the minorities were seen to be undermining pure nationalism. The scheme pledging to safeguard political and economic interests of minorities was characterised as a compromise between the proposals based on undiluted communalism and undiluted nationalism. He goes on to say that the various pos- sibilities of ensuring adequate representation for minorities like proportional representation were to "melt in the heat of the forging of a homogenised, pure, undiluted nationalism".

To show the manner in which the various provisions of minority rights were continuously eroded, Ansari describes how apart from the dropping of minority representation in the legislature, another provision relating to the representation of minorities in the public services was greatly altered to the disadvantage of the minorities [Ansari 1999: 123]. He further observes that the 'inominious burial' given to even a semblance of economic safeguards and to the provision for minority officers to monitor and report the working of minority safeguards, marked the culmination of a process of denudation that the majority performed on a 'demoralised'minority. He infers from all this that such limited assurances in the limited sphere of family laws given to

the minorities was the result of a compromise between undiluted pure nationalism and pure communalism that was accepted by the Congress to accommodate nationalist Muslims, when in the aftermath of partition it could very well have opted for a pure and homogeneous form of nationalism.

It is obvious that the provisions relating to minority rights in the Indian Constitution would have been of a much more far-reaching nature if the provisions described above had not been deleted.

References Ali, Amir (2000): 'Case for Multiculturalism in

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